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Recently I’ve spent several days on find the best way to set up an automation process for Javascript developers and I investigated several tools strictly related to the Javascript world.
These tools allow you to save a lot of time when you perform repetitive and sometimes boring tasks in order to test your HTML5 game, website or web app.
In this post I’d like to share with you what tools I’ve found and used to create a full-stack Javascript automation pipeline for any front end developer or team.

Let’s see what a Javascript developer or a team could automate in their machine to have a better code quality and to save a lot of time when they are working on their own library or projects.
For this purpose, in my pipeline, I’ve used different CLI tools like mocha, grunt, yeoman, blanket or plato.
Each of this tool allows you to perform a specific task but combined all together these tools will provide in your projects:

These are only few of the multiple options that you can have “playing” with these tools, but let’s try to go a little bit more in deep to see what tool can effectively help to accomplish each of the item present in the list above.

TDD, BDD and UNIT TEST

Surfing on the web about this topic on Javascript you’ll find really a lot of good libraries, the one I decided to use is Mocha because is very well integrated with Blanket (code coverage) and karma (tests runner) and because it’s based on node.js so you can create your libraries and then testing in pure javascript without any need to pass through HTML pages and if you need to test javascript code that will run only inside the browser you could fake the window object with libraries like jsdom integrated in your test cases.
Mocha allows you to work in BDD, TDD and in Unit Testing you can easily mix with several assertion libraries and writing also async tests became really really easy.
Other libraries that could be useful could be Jasmine or QUnit.

CODE COVERAGE

As I wrote before I found an interesting library that work perfectly with Mocha that is Blanket.js.
Blanket is very simple and easy to use library in particular when you have all your test written in modules (node.js style) instead of a mix between html and js files.
Blanket works not only with Mocha but also with Jasmine and QUnit, so basically with the most famous testing libraries!
One thing that I really appreciate of blanket is the final output that could be exported in an interactive HTML where immediately you can recognise what it’s not tested yet and jump from a file to another one following the menu on the right side of the template.
Another one that it seems quite interesting is Istanbul.js, I didn’t try yet but it’ll be the next one for sure, I heard really good experiences from other developers with this library!

STATIC ANALYSIS

When you want to use a static analysis tool in your pipeline on of the most popular is….
But I suggest to give a try to Plato in particular if you work alone or in a small team and you want to do a sanity check of your project.

Plato, in fact, store all the information of your code project locally in some JSON files and you can navigate through the report directly from an HTML page created by the tool (above a screenshoot sample).
These stats are very interesting to check the are of improvement of your project and in particular with these tools you can have an immediate feedback on where your efforts should be focused in order to deliver a better product and be sure that the maintenance shouldn’t cost too much later on.
Obviously you can also use more sophisticated solutions like SonarQube and install it inside your server with the Javascript plugin and run your static analysis every time a developer push his code in git or mercurial.
Depends always the dimension of the project and the team, my suggestion is to start with Plato in a small project and then when you see the real value move to SonarQube also if you are a small organisation.r

PROJECT TEMPLATE

When you talk about template for Javascript it’s impossible to forget of Yeoman.
Yeoman is a scaffolding tool that allow you to create skeleton of project with your favorite JS library ready to use.
I really suggest to use these kind of tools because it facilitates the beginning of new projects and give you at the same time some standards inside your company and between your projects.
There are several generators ready to use and searchable from the official website, if you can’t find what you’re looking for it’s very easy use Node.JS and the APIs already built in Yeoman to create your own generator with the functionalities that your company or projects need.

TASKS AUTOMATION and DEPENDENCIES MANAGEMENT

This is my favourite part, I found in Grunt a really good tool to automate more or less everything that is not strictly related to write the project code inside my IDE!
Grunt is the glue to assembly in a pipeline all the tools explained above, easily in one line inside your CLI: “grunt”.
The community is really huge and you can find more or less everything for Node.JS or plain Javascript, from minify, uglify and concatenate your JS files, to compile your LESS or SASS files, to convert your ES6 code to ES5, to run static analysis or push your code directly on git simply with a grunt task.
One thing that I really like of Grunt is that you can easily scale the way you are working with it using a yaml file and different js files (one per task) and assembly them at runtime.
This allows to create some common tasks for the whole company and at the same time have the freedom to add custom automation for each project and/or department of your company.
I really suggest to take a look to the official website where you can find also many technical information and then start to automate your daily Javascript workflow.
Obviously if you’re not working with JS you can still use Grunt in combination with your favourite programming language or technology like Haxe, Dart, Typescript, Coffeescript or Adobe AIR; the flexibility of this tool is really impressive!

An Alternative to Grunt could be Gulp where the main difference is that grunt favours configuration over code and Gulp exactly the opposite.
The Gulp community is growing day by day and it’s interesting to see the different approach between these two great task runners, probably in the long term the Gulp approach will be more successful but for now Grunt is exactly what I was looking for.

Conclusion

As you’ve read the JS world has got really a lot of useful tool that will save a lot of time during your daily job as developer or company.
The mix of these tools allow to create a pipeline in pure Javascript and they could really improve your code quality and your flow to have standards inside yout projects and a solid flow that will able to scale your company or projects in an easy and professional way.
Obviously there aren’t only these few tools and libraries that I’ve tried, there are many others outside there that I’d like to mention like PhantomJS or Buster or Lineman and so on, but form the next five minutes before come back on what you were doing before reading this post, try to think how to improve your flow, trust me you will remain surprise on how more productive you’ll become introducing them inside your routine.

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I don’t know if you had already read the open letter that Gary wrote recently discussing about the arguable marketing choice made by Adobe on Adobe AIR but also previously about the Flash Platform in general, but I suggest you to start from there before read this post.

If you know me personally or you are following me in the social networks or reading this blog you should know that I’m a big fan of Flash Platform, in particular of Adobe AIR.
I’m very committed to deliver amazing and cutting edge projects made with this fantastic technology and I’m involved in the community to spread the word about AIR.
From a developer perspective I’m 110% with Gary and the community; an amazing technology like Adobe AIR with really a lots of success behind in terms of developers and companies that adopted this technology and in terms of numbers of apps in released during the past few years in different platform.
AIR, in my opinion, should have a better commitment from the company that create it (partially).
Obviously I agree also that there isn’t any competition between Actionscript 3 and HTML5 (read Javascript), what you can really do with HTML5 is what a flash developer could do 5 years ago more or less.
But you can’t approach a discussion like this talking only from a developer perspective, you and we should see it from different angles also.
What I’m asking you is to follow me until to the end of this post then you can send me an email and ask me if I became totally crazy or insult me with a comment, no worries :D

I usually goes to Adobe Max since 2006, first MAX organised by Adobe, and I remember quite clearly that few MAX ago during both keynotes nobody said anything related to new Flash Platform improvements or plan for the future of the platform.
At the beginning I was so hungry and I spent literally hours on the phone to talk with Adobe people because the 100% of my business was based on this technology and they can’t really think that HTML5 could be better that Flash Platform, in particular in 2011/2012 where the most coolest websites, RIAs and desktop applications were realised with Flash.
But have you ever tried to think from a different point of view this situation? Let’s assume for few minutes that we are inside the meeting room of the Adobe.
You have an amazing technology that millions of people is using to innovate and create the best software in the world but you are not earning what you expect from it, don’t you believe me? Take a look at this chart (ADBE):

This is the graph of Adobe stock (ADBE) from January 2011 to December 2012, the value of the stock was for few months (close to October when usually Adobe Max takes place) lower than $28 and never greater of $35.
Great, obviously our white collars friends, aren’t so interested about which is the best technology in the market or how many people is using it; they care about numbers, how to increase the profit of the company and make happy the analyst to have a better position in the stocks market and with the shareholders.
These results weren’t so good for Adobe in fact, if you remember well, a lots of people started to leave the company, a lots of team was closed in USA or Europe to move the development side in India or in places where the developers are cheaper and Adobe started his commitment on the big new trend of new web technologies products like the Edge family for instance.
Everybody now knows very well the following story about the new products and how they are trying to improve the way to create websites and apps, and I guess the majority of us it’s not so happy about that.
But let’s take a look again to some numbers, the next graph will show you the Adobe stock value from 2012 to March 2014 basically in the period where Adobe left to push the Flash Platform and started to increase the investment on designers products:

I think is quite explicit that the politic to start selling their products on Cloud (first big mover in the IT panorama), the decision to try to improve a new technology like HTML5 with new tools and so on, create around the Adobe what the management was looking for!
I agree with you that there are many ways to make money but from the metrics perspective they are going in the right direction and they did the right choices for now.
I’m not an economist and I can’t say if this strategy will pay in the long term but for sure in the short term they arrived where they wanted to be.

With this post I’m not trying to defend Adobe, but after many years where the Flash Platform is in this status I started to leave my angry mood and to interrogate myself on why they took this decision, honestly I can’t say if that it’s the only reason that drives Adobe in these big changes but excluding the technical side that’s the only way I can see this thing and now most part of their decision make finally sense.
All the comments I’ve read in the past and also in these days after the Gary’s letter to Adobe is completely true but often, as developers, we forget that it’s not just a design pattern or a performance optimisation that could save the world, the marketing and the market are the real drivers, in front of them also a big corporation like Adobe could defeated.

UPDATE FROM ADOBE

Chris, the new product manager of Adobe AIR, replied to Gary’s open letter, you can read the answer in the official blog

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Recently I’ve spent time to study a good way to manage a software projects with GIT.
I really read a lots of blog post to check different points of view and to find out which is the best technique to use in different situations.

The principals ways to manage a software in GIT are: the Git Flow and the Github Flow.
These 2 methods can really help you to manage your project and optimise your workflow in the team.
Let’s see the differences between them.

Git Flow

git flow

Git flow works with different branches to manage easily each phase of the software development, it’s suggested to be used when your software has the concept of “release” because, as you can see in the scheme above, it’s not the best decision when you work in Continuous Delivery or Continuos Deployment environment where this concept is missing.
Another good point of this flow is that fits perfectly when you work in team and one or more developers have to collaborate to the same feature.
But let’s take a look closer to this model.

The main branches in this flow are:

master

develop

features

hotfix

release

When you clone a GIT repository in your local folder you have immediately to create a branch from the master called develop, this branch will be the main branch for the development and where all the developers in a team will work to implement new features or bug fixing before the release.
Every time a developer needs to add a new feature he will create a new branch from develop that allow him to work properly in that feature without compromise the code for the other people in the team in the develop branch.
When the feature will be ready and tested it could be rebased inside the develop branch, our goal is to have always a stable version of develop branch because we merge the code only when the new feature is completed and it’s working.
When all the features related to a new release are implemented in the develop branch it’s time to branch the code to the release branch where there you’ll start to test properly before the final deployment.
When you branch your code from develop to release you should avoid to add new features but you should only fix bugs inside the release branch code until to you create a stable release branch.
At the end, when you are ready to push live deploy live your project, you will tag the version inside the master branch so there you can have all the different versions that you release week by week.
Apparently it could seem to much steps but it’s for sure quite safe and helps you to avoid mistakes or problem when you release, obviously to accomplish all this tasks you can find online a lots of scripts that could help you to work with Git flow in the command line or if you prefer you can use visual tools like SourceTree by Atlassian that make the dirty work for you, so you have to follow only the instructions inside the software to manage all the branches, for this reason I’ve also prepared a short video to see how use this flow with SourceTree

Github Flow

So now, do you think that Github is working with Git Flow? Of course no! (Honestly I was really surprised when I read that!)
In fact they are working with a continuos deployment environment where there isn’t the concept of “release” because every time they finish to prepare a new feature they push live immediately (after the whole automation chain created in the environment).
The main concepts behind the Github flow are:

Anything in the master branch is deployable

To work on something new, create a descriptively named branch off of master (ie:new-oauth2-scopes)

Commit to that branch locally and regularly push your work to the same named branch on the server

When you need feedback or help, or you think the branch is ready for merging, open a pull request

After someone else has reviewed and signed off on the feature, you can merge it into master

Once it is merged and pushed to ‘master’, you can and should deploy immediately

I found an amazing interactive page where you can deepen the knowledge of this method, but I see it’s very common when you work in QA teams, small teams or you are working as freelance because it’s true that is a lightweight flow to manage a project but it’s also quite clear and secure when you want to merge your code in the master branch.
Another good resource about Github Flow is the blog post made by the Github evangelist Scott Chacon.
I recorded also a video on how to use Github flow with SourceTree:

If you have any other method to manage your project in GIT feel free to share because I’m quite interesting to see how you usually work with GIT and if there are better ways to work with and if you have any other feedback or question I’m here for you!

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As you read in my previous post “Approaching Scrum”, in the short description of this Agile technique, I talked about 3 main roles that composed the Scrum team.

The main 3 roles are:

Product Owner

Scrum Master

Development Team

There are also other people that partecipate in a Scrum team and I’ll talk about them in a bit.
I’d like to share a brief introduction to each role before talk, in another post, about the Scrum process in details.

Where is the project manager ?

That’s a good question, as you can see above in the list of the main roles, the project manager role is not mentioned.
Basically what the project manager represents in the traditional software development where basically manage the communication between clients and the company, manage the team’s tasks and so on, in Scrum we are dividing those functions trough the members of the Scrum team (product owner, scrum master and development team) giving more responsibilities to them.
This thing will have a positive impact with the whole team that is more involved in each part of the project (planning, decision and development) and they can drive the risk using Scrum to achieve the best business value so the best result for their customers.
Another important aspect to take in consideration, when you are working with Scrum, is that we don’t have the concept of “project” anymore, but we’ll work on features and improvements with a continuos delivery instead of a “big bang delivery” at the end of the project.
This will ensure that we’ll focus more in the business value instead of waste time in something that is not important for that project and that couldn’t have the right value for our stakeholders.
For my perspective a natural evolution for a project manager could be the product owner, or if he has got a technical background could be Scrum Master; for sure the most important thing is that he has to change the way to approach any development and he has to think in a collaborative instead of a hierarchical way.

Product Owner

This role is very important inside a Scrum team, in fact the product owner is the “voice” of stakeholders and customers or users.
He is also the person that has the product vision, that is in charge to take the right business decisions during the development of a new or existing product and he has to help the team, if it’s possible everyday, answering on questions related to the product.
He is in charge to create and maintain the Product Backlog and to share the product vision with the whole Scrum team.
The most important thing is that the Product Owner is always available for the team because he is part of the team and his role is essential to accomplish all the business aims of a project.
In fact he is in charge to order the activities to do in the Product Backlog and to update them (this process is called grooming) following the customer’s perspective.
Usually the Product Owner is someone that have familiarity to talk with customers or internal management as well and he is quite technical to talk with the Development Team.

Scrum Master

The perfect definition of a Scrum Master is: “Mr. Wolf” !
The Scrum Master is the person that try to facilitate the use of Scrum inside the team, he has to remove impediments to the Scrum team, facilitate Scrum introduction in a new team, avoid any external distraction to the Development team and so on.
The key concept for any person that is approaching this role is that you are not a chief of someboy, you are coaching Scrum to people not imposing something to them!
In fact another good definition of Scrum Master is the servant leader.
Usually the Scrum Master is a Lead Developer or a QA person anyway it should be someone that has got enough technical knowledge to understand and solve the problem of the Team and to discuss with the Product Owner and guide him to create good artifacts for the Scrum team.This activity required more or less the 50% of the time for a person so usually the Scrum Master is often member of the Development Team as well.

Development Team

When Scrum talks about Development Team it doesn’t mean only developers but a group of people that work actively to the product.
So inside the development team we can find: analysts, designers, testers, UX team, developers and so on.
In Scrum the team has cross-functional skills that allow them to deliver feature every Sprint.
Another important thing is that the team is self organised so nobody (nor the Scrum Master neither the Product Owner) can add activities to their daily job or impose the timeframe to finish a task.
At the beginning it could be so strange but in this case people in a team assume more responsibility and the project will be done in the best way ever.
In the old way to manage a team where the project manager imposed his role to have the feature that he wants when he wants, the team was only executive people without any relation with the project and often without any reward if the project will be well done.
In Scrum the team is in charge to estimate the project, to choose the task to accomplish during a Sprint deciding them with the Product Owner and, last but not least the team has to develop more features as possible with an high quality of code (tested, documented and so on).
We’ll talk more in deep about estimates and about the “definition of done” in next posts for now what you need to know is that the team is not passive anymore but they play an active and important role to achieve the goals of each product.

Other actors

In Scrum the main roles are what you have read above but there are many other people that partecipate to the good delivery of a product, in particular when you start to scalate Scrum to many teams.
In fact Scrum is a framework to manage 1 or 2 teams but not more, there are many other Agile frameworks that help you in this activity like SAFe (Scaled Agile Framework).
Other people that partecipate to the delivery of a project are for sure the stakeholders.
Stakeholders can be internal or external, when we refer to internal stakeholders we have to think to our management that share with the team their needs and how their point of view to improve or change the product developed by the team.
The external stakeholders are our customers or users, yes you read well, our customers or users are very important in the Scrum process because they are the ones that decide if the project is going in the right direction or is failing.
Personally I think is the biggest challenge involve our customers inside the Scrum process but for sure it will be very useful for the team and the product because they can constantly give us feedback on the right direction to take with the product.

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Have you ever felt disappointed because you don’t finish a project in time?When you try to estimate a project you feel like a poker player?Have you ever wrote bad code because you were overtime and you needed to delivery as fast as possible?

If you think that there isn’t a way to escape from this nightmare you are completely wrong and I understood it in the las few months as well!
I don’t want to say that with Agile you can solve everything, but what I can say that for sure it can help you to achieve your goals and deliver in time with the best quality and value for your customers or users.

Let’s start from the beginning…

What is Scrum?

Scrum is an iterative and incremental Agile software development framework for managing software projects and product or application development. Its focus is on “a flexible, holistic product development strategy where a development team works as a unit to reach a common goal” as opposed to a “traditional, sequential approach”. Scrum enables the creation of self-organizing teams by encouraging co-location of all team members, and verbal communication among all team members and disciplines in the project.

A key principle of Scrum is its recognition that during a project the customers can change their minds about what they want and need (often called requirements churn), and that unpredicted challenges cannot be easily addressed in a traditional predictive or planned manner. As such, Scrum adopts an empirical approach—accepting that the problem cannot be fully understood or defined, focusing instead on maximizing the team’s ability to deliver quickly and respond to emerging requirements.

When you start to read about Scrum a lot of things seem impossible to apply in your daily job but I think that, like any transition period, you can arrive to work completely in Scrum in less than 6 months if you really want change your organization and improve it.
From my experience Scrum is a good framework that should be used extensively if you are working in products that will be delivered to the final user, otherwise you have to train up your customer to be Agile; but in the real world it could be more difficult.
Mainly because you need to have a good trustability before start to involve them in an Agile process and sometimes there isn’t enough time to do so.

Why have I to use Scrum?

That’s a good question, it was the same that I asked me few months ago and finally I’ve an answer, if you are a developer think when you started to write the first lines of code, obviously day by day you increase your knowledge and your code became even better until to the procedural code it wasn’t enough and you try to look to something more.
Then you have discovered OOP concepts and maybe design patterns, after few times you started to work with MVC, MVP, MVVM or your favourite architecture and probably after many years if you look back you won’t write procedural code anymore.
Does it sound familiar?
In the same way of Design Patterns and a micro-architecture that drive you to create solid and maintainable project, Scrum can help you to organise your projects creating a great business value, knowing every time the next steps and the actual status of the project, estimating better the goals and the time to achieve them and last but not least to drive the risk in a better way than the “traditional” methodology (waterfall model for instance).

How does Scrum works?

Scrum

As you can see from the diagram above, Scrum is an iterative workflow that happens in a small amount of time (usually 2 weeks or 4 weeks at least) where with few documents and a lot of communication you can achieve the best trade off between the business value for your final customer and the best quality of your software.
Scrum is composed by some actors (Product Owner, Scrum Master, Development team and Stakeholders), some meetings (Release Planning, Backlog Refinement, Daily Scrum, Sprint Planning, Sprint Review, Sprint Retrospective) and few artifacts (Product Backlog, Sprint Backlog, Burndown chart, Product Increment).
The most important concept that you have to keep in mind is that Scrum is easy to use and to understand but if you want to have its benefits you have to follow its rules.
To enter in this interesting world you have to keep in mind the 3 main concepts of an empirical process like Scrum:

Transparency

Inspection

Adaptation

Without this 3 fundamentals principles, Scrum it’s not useful at all!
Transparency means that you and your team don’t have to hide anything to anybody, if there are any impediments or problems or bottleneck following Scrum you can find and resolve them.
Inspection means that you and your team have to analyse what you have done after a small amount of time (Sprint Retrospective) and find what positive or negative was happened during that period.
Adaptation means that everything is not binary (0 or 1, true or false) but you have to adapt your way to work day by day improving yourself inspecting what you have done and being agile!

If you want Scrum is not only a good approach to work, it could be a good approach for life as well!(Check also this useful article on Scrum Alliance website that explains Scrum in 30 secs)

Ok, now I’m really interested in Scrum, where to begin?

In this book you can really understand how the Scrum framework works and how to use it in your daily job.
I also suggest it if you are planning to join in a Scrum training course, it can really help you to have a good preparation for the course and for the following certification exam.

Next steps

What I’d like to share with you is my notes about Scrum studied on books, read on blog or social networks and share with my fellows, my idea is to fix few concepts on this blog that could be helpful also for people that is approaching Scrum right now or they would like to know more about it.
There are really tons of things to know and you’ll never finish to learn (as usual) so I think a blog it could be a good resource to share the basic of Scrum and in the future, going more in deep with real case studies related to my daily job.
I hope you will enjoy this information that are not what you usually find in my blog but maybe could be interesting as well, as usual any suggestion will be very appreciated so don’t be shy and share your thoughts!

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Today I’d like to talk about something that is not strictly related to development process but that it’s very useful when you are running your company as freelance or entrepreneur or if you are team leader of a team.
One of the most important thing for me when you approach a new technology is not only understand if it could fit all your needs but also understand when you introduce in your team or company how to have the best result as soon as possible.
That’s why I keep always a lot of attention on how to create a flexible and elastic workflow that allow my team to create or modify client side solutions without waste our time.
In last years we rapidly see the grow of an hot topic, strictly related to HTML5 and Javascript, like Responsive Design, so the capability to create an interface that is viewable and usable on different devices (from smartphones to web browsers for instance).
Personally, if I didn’t find anything that help my team to be immediately very productive I usually avoid to introduce new softwares in the actual workflow, but this time we are in the middle of a big revolution where HTML5 and Javascript are the main protagonists.
During last Adobe MAX I saw a couple of interesting demo on Edge “family” and I was impressed on the capability of Edge Reflow and its interaction with Photoshop CC to create user interfaces for different devices in really few time, that’s why I was really waiting to test this feature and I’d like to share with you my first experiment.

Photoshop CC and Edge Reflow

I think a lot of designers create the UI for a project with Photoshop, last Monday (9th September) Adobe released an update of Photoshop CC and Edge Reflow, but we start with Photoshop because the news are really cool.
One of the most boring activity for a designer (or for me when I did it as freelance :D) is to cut all images and prepare assets in different folders for the developers.
Photoshop CC helps us introducing a new feature called Adobe Generator, a new way to automate this long and tedious phase, where the designer has only to follow some simple rules on how to nominate Photoshop levels and the software automatically export all the assets for us, ready to be delivered to the developers team!
For instance if you want to export a particular level as PNG you need only to nominate the level with a PNG extension (for example: “background.png”) and run the new Photoshop command Generate > Image Assets to have all our files ready to be added on the real project.

To know more about Adobe Generator and in particular to know how to set the name of each level I warmly suggest to take a look to Photoshop.com where there are all the information to do that.
Another option that we have (as you can see in the image above) is the capability to export the UI structure and the assets to Edge Reflow.
If you don’t know what is Edge Reflow I explain it in few words.
Edge Reflow is a tool useful to create responsive design layout and, from yesterday, completely integrated with Photoshop CC.
In fact now you can import in Edge Reflow your layout and you can start to customise it visually for any screen resolution your project will work.

The most interesting thing is that you can export from Photoshop an Edge Reflow project, or you can synchronise in real time the changes when the 2 softwares are open.
Then you can create your layout for different resolutions only copying and paste the code generate from Edge Reflow in your favorite code IDE; I mean copy and paste for now instead of import because probably (at 99%) you’ll have to improve or change it a little bit after paste but it’s really a good step forward for a software in preview like Edge Reflow.
With Edge Reflow you can create <div> adding box elements in your layout and you can show or hide elements present in different screen resolution simply with the options in the left side of the software interface.
Another very cool thing is the capability to work with your Typekit account (integrated in your Creative Cloud subscription) to download the fonts needed in the layout made with Photoshop.

Edge Reflow and Edge Inspect

Last but not least, Edge Reflow is integrated with another cool product of the Edge family called Inspect.
Edge Inspect is a simple application that you can add as plug-in in Chrome or you can download in your iOS or Android device from the relative store, and it allows you to test in real time all the changes you are doing in a website or more in general in HTML, JS or CSS file checking in real time the final result in one or more than one device simultaneously.
This is a capability that partially missed in the flash development workflow where the mobile test was a real pain (in particular the first releases of Adobe AIR on mobile), in this case with all those new technologies Adobe decides to evolve and improve this experience giving good tools to develop.

From a developer perspective

Personally I think that the integration of a technology like Node.JS in last Adobe softwares (Brackets, Adobe Generator, Edge Reflow and so on) is giving a real boost to them, and they are opening new horizons in the desktop application field, in particular I suggest to take a look to Node-Webkit, an open source project that allow you to work with HTML5, Javascript (Node.JS obviously) and WebGL to create desktop application for different platforms.
There are many other tools that could help to achieve the same goal like TideSDK for example, but I think Node-Webkit could be very interesting if the project will be well approach by the community.

Conclusions

Finally the big players on the market are delivering tools that allow us to create engaging and amazing experience with HTML5 and Javascript like other technologies did in the past (Flash Platform in primis).
The combination of Photoshop CC, Adobe Generator, Edge Reflow and Edge Inspect give us a real flexible and integrated workflow where in few steps we can save a lot of hours spent on the code with great results.
Obviously those tools are new and in “preview” so they are not perfect but they are stable and useful enough at this point to be integrated in the actual daily workflow giving immediately importart results.
I really hope this is the first steps to give us the freedom to create instead became crazy to have layouts working in different browsers and devices.

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In this post I’d like to highlight a topic that is not the classic tip to use everyday but when it needs probably this “recipe” could help.

In last few weeks I had the opportunity to study how to compare 2 or more images and find similar colors between them.
Sincerely when I started I really don’t know how to do that, so I tried to read on the web the best way to accomplish this task.
There are many different way to compare colours, the easiest way that I found it’s working with RGB color space but a lots of experts advice against this technique and they suggest to run away from RGB color space and work with different color spaces, in particular with which one work in 3D space.
The most complete is for sure the CIELAB so if you need to create an algorithm that compare in the best way colours I really suggest to work with this color space and read this post on this topic, in my case I need something in the middle so a colour space that could guarantee the perfect trade off between complexity and accuracy.
In fact I worked in this example with a 3D space like HSV (Hue, Saturation, Value), before go ahead with the post I warmly suggest to read more about HSV directly on wikipedia.

And now let’s go ahead!!!

I prepare a class that you don’t need to change if the idea behind it fit your needs, so this is the code to compare 2 images with my ColorComparision object:

As you can see, in the second line you will receive an Array of colors in RGB that you can use if you want in the UI or only as data if you want to add more complexity to this algorithm.

This comparison is made in this way:

1. I retrieve 64 average colors inside each image (inside the class ColorComparision I set a constant if you need to change this value)
2. I convert each colour from RGB to HSV
3. I calculate the distance between each colour of the first image compared with each colour of the second image

To be more complete as possible I expose also the capability to set the tolerance of the comparison in this way:

util.tollerance = Math.round(slider.value);

Finally I made a quick example where you can play with your images and see what happens, basically in this basic sample when you’ll click “compare” button you will find the color similar between 2 images you will compare.

Last but not least I leave you also this quick method to translate RGB color to HEX and use them in your Flash application:

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Here we are again with another topic about Dart language, first of all I’d like to start this article with an off-topic.

I joined to FluentJS in San Francisco few weeks ago, an event organize by O’Reilly focus on Javascript development, and I saw a Dart language session, the most amazing thing I’ve seen was the passion behind this project, trust me that it’s not easy today find people that believe in that way in something, Seth Ladd, the speaker and team member of Dart, gave us a great technical introduction to Dart but gave us something more, he transmitted us all his passion on Dart, really amazing!

After this quick off-topic, let’s go ahead with Isolates tutorial.

First of all, Isolates is the Dart way to work with threads and allow to take advantage of your multicore computer, but what is multithreading and when we should use it.

Multithreading

This is a good definition for me: “Multithreading is the ability of a CPU to execute several threads of execution apparently at the same time. CPUs are very fast at executing instructions. Modern PCs can execute nearly a billion instructions every second. Instead of running the same program for one second, the CPU will run one program for perhaps a few hundred microseconds then switch to another and run it for a short while and so on.” (source: cplus.about.com)

And when should we use threads?!

Basically every time you need to speed up an intensive process, for example when you have an heavy process like unzip of a big file or a for cycle with a lots of elements, you should use the threads to don’t freeze the main one and allow your user to work the interface without any issues.

Dart adds this capability in 2 different ways because, as you know you, it can export a project for Dart VM or in Javascript, with Dartium we can use the power of CPUs of your multicore computer and create different threads in each CPU where will be executed your code, in Javascript, Dart converts Isolates in web workers.

Before starting with code I decide to show in a chart how we’ll work with isolates, so basically first of all we create 2 isolates launched from the main isolate and then we pass the final informations elaborated in different isolates to the main one.

Last note, when you work with isolate you can have a sender and a receiver, so in the main isolate (launched by the application) you have a port object where you can listen when you receive informations from other isolates and you can pass the sendport object where you can send message to other isolates.

port.receive((data, SendPort replyTo){replyTo.send("something");});

Another important thing to remember when you work with isolates, if you need to receive messages from other isolates, is that you always set the receiver in the main isolate, or you will n0t receive any message from other isolates because the execution of your program is not waiting for any reply without a receiver set.

As you can see when I click on MONO link my CSS animation stops until to the heavy iteration is finished instead when I click on ISOLATE link everything works well because all the iterations are accomplished in different isolates so the main one could go ahead with own job.

When you want to launch an isolate you have to call the spawnfunction method and pass the main isolate sender:

It’s finally important remember to close isolates after received the message so when they have finished to accomplish own function, to do that you have only to call the close method in the main isolate and it will not receive any other information from other isolates.
In my example I launched 2 isolates to accomplish the task, so I created a counter variables to store how many reply the main isolate received, after received all replies I can close the communication with other isolates:

port.receive((data, SendPort replyTo){ counterIsolate++; end = new DateTime.now(); if(counterIsolate == 2){ var finalTime = end.difference(start).toString(); myH1.appendHtml("isolate total time: <b>$finalTime</b><br/>"); // if you want to close isolates you have to use the line below port.close(); } });

The most interesting thing is that you can accomplish the same task in 2 different way, the first one, as I did in my example, with inline isolates and the second one is loading code dinamically from external Dart files.
To take a look to the second one I suggest to read this post made by Seth Ladd.

Isolate technique is very useful also when you are working on a serverside project with Dart because it could optimize some intensive process that you have to achieve during your project.

I’ve just opened a github repository with all Dart examples that I’m working on, so feel free to check out at this link.
Enjoy!

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Let’s start from the end of my weekend, this is what I’ve just finished:

And now it’s time to explain what there is behind.

What you have just seen is a PoC (Proof of Concept) for an application that I’ve in mind, it allowed me to study, test and having fun with different technologies, in this post I’d like to share what I’ve learnt in less than 24 hours.
I worked with different technologies as the post title suggest, I was really curios to see how I can create good application UI on Tizen OS and understand more about its limits (if there were of course) and performances.
At the beginning, I worked on the 2.5D animation where I had to scale, skew and rotate any images chosen by the user from the Gallery application.
When I started this part I tried immediately the CSS3 transitions, I thought: “They are new, so probably they care about performances on mobile!”, so after 3 hours to play with CSS3 transitions and trying to have a smooth animation on Tizen, I decide to move on Canvas!
CSS3 transitions are very good for web and desktop, but for mobile when you start to do many heavy animations they really suck, in this Tizen device (it has an hardware similar to Galaxy S3) that is so powerful everything has to work well and with them I can’t achieve my idea.

So I moved to Canvas, but I thought to find something that could help me during my “coding time” and that it feels me more comfortable so I remembered that I’ve used long time ago CreateJS for some test and in this case it helps me a lot.
When you work with CreateJS, more or less you are working with Actionscript with some small changes, for any Actionscript developer it should be a good start to move on Javascript, but there are many other options as Dart or Typescript for example that are good enough for any developer that is looking for something more than Javascript (my 2 cents).
But in this case CreateJS helps me a lot because is highly focused on Canvas development so definitely what I was looking for.
I haven’t any trouble with this library on Tizen, the performance are so good as you have seen on the video and I didn’t write so much code, my Javascript file for the whole app is less than 260 lines, not a lot I guess.

After that I moved on and I start to work with Tizen web APIs to get images from the Gallery application.
In this case the Tizen developer forum and the online guide help me so much, in fact I found a working example in the forum that I had only to customise for my PoC.
The big issue that I found here is if I want to select more than one image, working with Gallery instance, I couldn’t do that or maybe I couldn’t find a way to do that, so I decided to create a quick picker (at the beginning of my application) to allow me to choose more than one image to the time.
To do that I had to work with filesystem APIs instead of the Gallery one, but in a while I had done everything, this is the code to retrieve all images from Image folder of Tizen OS, but you can use to retrieve any kind of files on Tizen OS:

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Yesterday Tizen conference finished with a lot of great things announced, so in this post I’d like to recap the main news that I’ve catch during this conference.
First of all Tizen is an open source operating system, not only for mobile purpose but also for TVs and automotive market too.
Behind Tizen there are many players but the most interesting are Samsung, of course, and Intel.
Actually Samsung is working on the new version of Tizen, the 3.0, but they have just released the 2.1 that allow any web developer, C++ developer or Unity developer to deliver content on this new OS.
The first devices will be shipped this summer (more or less), in Europe the first operator that believe in Tizen will be Orange, in Asia otherwise will be NTT DoCoMo.
Web development APIs on Tizen are hardware accelereted, so the performance should be incredible, actually if you want to start work with Tizen is quite easy, first of all you have to download the SDK, then inside the SDK you can find the TizenIDE that allow you to create Web Application or Native Application, debug them and prepare for the store.
This IDE is really well done in fact you can debug your application in a simulator (quite similar to the last introduced in Flash CS6 or Device Central for example), directly on the device trough USB, or in the emulator; the simulator and emulator are inside the free SDK that you can download directly from Tizen website.
Web Applications, at this moment, run in Tizen Web Runtime not with Phonegap or other frameworks but Apache Cordova is working to support Tizen export soon and they would like to add on Phonegap buid solution made by Adobe.
Tizen is based on webkit and it’s the most compliant platform at the moment with a score of 492/500.

Another great thing of Tizen is that Samsung created a real platform around it, in fact for the native side you can also create and skin your GUI directly with Tizen UI Builder, a software similar to Apple Interface Builder and it helps a lot during the creation and definition of UI.

I followed a couple of session dedicated on how to port PhoneGap application on Tizen and it’s interesting to know that the porting is so smooth (less than a week for many games).
The Web Runtime APIs for Tizen are very powerful, they allow to work with Bluetooth, NFC and many others low-level features in a really easy way.

At the end of the event any attendee received a device for testing purpose, so after dinner I started to play with Tizen and the Web Runtime, mainly to understand if there are many differences between a Tizen app and a Phonegap one.
As you can see in few time I create an example that works on Tizen with HTML5, Jquery Mobile and Underscore.js

The first impression is positive, everything works well, I didn’t find any kind of problems, the documentation is well done and you can find a lot of resources directly on developers website.
I didn’t try yet to work with platform APIs but I see on the documentation that are quite similar to Phonegap so I don’t think that a Phonegap developer could have any problems to work with them.

Last but not least, Samsung has created an app challenge that will start at the beginning of June where you can win a lot of money so if you want to partecipate take a look at the challenge website.

Finally, Tizen is going in the right direction for me, the big deal will be the penetration on the mature markets, if many people all over the world will start to buy it and use it, probably it should become so interesting, but for now we have to wait the launch of the devices.